Hmm.. I did some googling out of curiosity, and there are a lot of people trying to switch from one to the other who think the one they're switching into looks hard and impossible to parse through... I think the deal is they're just too different from each other. The few people who are actually proficient in both PHP and .NET basically say it comes down to personal preference.
I think what you encountered is more of a .NET problem (or a this-company-has-crappy-legacy-code-and-coding-standards problem) than a problem with the C# language itself. To me, for example, the code works exactly how I intuit it should, and database access from .NET/C# is easy, and I've done it with a handful of different interfaces and been able to become fluent in each of them (stored procedures, NHibernate, LINQ-to-SQL, Raven/NoSQL)
.NET development has changed a lot, too. If you were coding ASP.OLD / Web Sites / Web Forms, rather than MVC (which is now up to MVC 3), you probably either A) had to do inline C# coding in the same file as your ASPX/HTML, or B) dealt with a lot of crappy event handlers which had to be written in the code-behind, of the form "protected void MyButton_OnProcessClick(object sender, EventArgs[] e)" or whatever. That stuff is the devil.
MVC is more intuitive and has more separation between the C# code and the ASPX files. If you're handling a client-side click event, you can do it in JavaScript or whatever. The C# is just there to handle gets and posts to URLs (and you can even manage the routing). You have the option for a lot of fine control in MVC.
I'm not too familiar with PHP or what it's capable of or the maintenance costs of it, but with the right coding practices, well-written C# code can look pretty close to straight-up English, and one of the big perks is that it's easy to write regression tests for the code. (And since MVC completely separates the C# from the webpages themselves, you can even write automated tests for your web projects that don't have to spin up a browser).
You've got me curious about PHP, I'd like to be more knowledgeable about it so I can actually weigh the differences, but I guess I don't have much reason to since I won't be using it at work... ah well...
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bokonon get your sense-making the **** out of this topic now - Cat1001
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